Dictatorship or Single Tax

Harry Weinberger, Esq.

[An address the author hoped to deliver at the Henry George Congress. He was not able to attend and because of a filled schedule the paper was not read to the attendees. Reprinted from Land and Freedom, January-February, 1935]

A People who are hungered cannot stay free. Occasional brave souls may starve and struggle to the end to maintain liberty and democracy. Large groups may fight while starving, and die in the struggle, it being:

"A short life in the saddle, Lord,
Not a long life by the fire."

For an entire nation, unemployment and starvation however will lead that nation inevitably to accept dictatorship in preference to hunger; whether that dictatorship is in the form of Fascism, Naziism or Communism.

Today the American people are engaged in a great struggle against economic depression, a struggle as great as the Revolution of 1776, a struggle as depressing as the Civil War of 1861, a struggle in some ways for millions of our people as horrible as the World War. If hunger and unemployment continue, will the blind Samson of hunger pull down the Temple of Civilization]

This present depression is testing whether our nation conceived in liberty, faced with world economic forces, can long endure without a dictator. Nation after nation has succumbed to regimentation or civil war. Will history recall that our democracy as well as that of other nations was only a passing phase to mark the transition from the divine right of kings to dictatorship?

Shall we allow that it is necessary to set aside the principles of individual freedom and regiment a nation in order to promote experiments to improve economic conditions. A small group in Russia, by force and terror, took from its people liberty, and promised to return it some day. More than fifteen years have elapsed since that time and liberty has not been returned to the Russian people. The Facsists of Italy and the Nazis of Germany have taken away liberty without even a promise of its return. They liquidate their opponents in Russia, castor-oil-ize them in Italy, shoot then in Germany, put them in a Code in the United States as the opening step for a regimented nation. Only three of the great nations of the world are still really democratic -- England, France and the United States.

If we have now in the United States a government of men and not law, if the Constitution of the United States guaranteeing freedom, protecting private property, protecting contracts, has been abolished or is in the process of being abolished, tomorrow or next year instead of a mild idealistic President, we may have a dictator who will end all liberty, having been taught by an idealistic President how to regiment the people by force and fear in a time of depression and unemployment. Senator Borah well said:

"Precedents established by capable hands for desirable purposes are still precedents for incapable hands and undesirable purposes."

Life even with all economic questions solved, if without liberty, would be like a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting.

Every form of dictatorship in whatever guise it may come, must be resisted to the bitter end. Eternal vigilance is still the price of liberty. This has been said thousands of times but always needs repeating, and never more than now.

It is better to die on fighting feet than to live on bended knees. We must not listen to men on bended knees those who do so cannot judge the size of other men.

We must however solve the unemployment problem; solve the bread question, the cost of living question; the decent housing question, or people and nations in panic and desperation may continue to flock to dictators like frightened children. The youths of the United States stand helpless and hopeless asking for jobs, and in the most fertile land in the world, blessed with all the raw material necessary and the finest engineering science, marvelous roads and railroads, with millions of acres of land unused, trade stands still and millions are eating the bread of charity who never ate it before. Taxes are mounting higher and higher, taxes in every form; and once proud cities and states are turning to the Federal Government for aid lest they perish or go bankrupt.

In the meanwhile, almost without exception, cities, counties and states allow the unearned increment of land which is created by all the people to be taken by private individuals; it allows land to be held out of use waiting for a speculative rise in price; it fails to take for community needs the full rental value of the bare land which was created by no man, which act alone would force all land into its fullest economic use, create more jobs than men, raise wages, reduce the cost of living, lower rents, and abolish all relief rolls except for the old and feeble or incapacitated.

There can be no overproduction; there is only under-consumption. Today we have wonderful machinery making too much clothing so that millions are without clothes and without jobs. We have agriculture that produces so much wheat and corn and fruits and vegetables that millions have to go hungry; we have so many houses that millions are homeless. There is no limit to human consumptive power; there is only underconsumption caused by inability to purchase. There is no man, no matter how poor or how wealthy who cannot use hundreds of things, who would not like to own and use more of the bare necessities of life, from simple bread to fine cake, from simple clothes to elaborate clothes, from newspapers to fine books, from ordinary pictures to masterpieces, from a simple harmonica to a fine violin, from an old tin-can piano to a grand piano, from a tallow candle to an electric light, from a one horse shay to the latest airplane or automobile, from a row-boat to a yacht, from a noisy city apartment to a beautiful home in the country.

When we had a tremendous housing shortage in New York City and rents were soaring to the skies, it was proposed that all houses built within a certain period would be tax exempt for ten years; that law of the exemption of houses from taxation was passed. Thousands of houses were built, the housing shortage was solved, hundreds of thousands of people were given jobs directly or indirectly and rents came down.

I need not state any of the usual arguments for Single Tax to most of this audience. However, let me give two examples, for others who may hear or read this address.

In the City of New York the New School for Social Research wanted to build a building on Twelfth street, and they paid two hundred thousand dollars for the mere fee of the land on which to erect the building. No one produced that land no one except the community produced the value of that land, yet some one pocketed two hundred thousand dollars.

The Wendell home on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street, with its dog yard has been rented to a chain store at a rental of about three hundred thousand dollars a year, so that before labor can be paid a penny in wages, before capital can earn a penny in dividends, three hundred thousand dollars worth of goods must be produced yearly and paid over to the present owners of the land who inherited it from the Wendells.

This situation is repeated millions of times in the United States and often when labor strikes for more wages and shorter hours and capital replies it cannot afford it, then bitter strikes break out, leading to riots, disorder, deaths and the destruction of property. Capital and labor under these circumstances are very much like two Kilkenny cats who have had their tails tied together and are scratching and biting at each other, each thinking the other the enemy, while as a matter of fact, the real enemy is the one who tied their tails together. The enemy of both capital and labor are those who receive the community-created rental values of land.

The law of supply and demand cannot be repealed unless we go under a despotism, whether that despotism is called Communism, Naziism or N. R. A. That road means the destruction of democracy. The people of the United States may vote for it if they want it, for as Abraham Lincoln said in his first inaugural address:

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."

The change, however, must not be done by one man or a handful of public officials who were elected with no such mandate from the people, but it must be done by the people themselves.

Let us use all land to its fullest economic use, agricultural, industrial or residential. Let us use the full machine power, all science, all speed, all manpower as if we were at war. Continue under our present system. Tell the people of America that they can build houses, or repair them, build factories or barns, make improvements without having their taxes increased and unemployment will cease in America without begging the banks to make loans.

Break down and pull down the high tariff walls raze them, so that other nations may do likewise, so that trade and goods may flow through the world again, so that nations will cease to fear that they cannot get raw materials for their people to eat or manufacture. Tariff walls cause nations to want more and more land of their neighbors, and they prepare for war while trade is not free. This preparation for war entails a burden that is like the Old Man of the Sea whom Sinbad carried almost to the point of his destruction.

How many additional men and women are on the public pay-rolls since the New Deal? I am not referring to relief rolls. What is the total amount of their unnecessary salaries? How many people are employed on code enforcements? How much spying is going on, how much added bitterness is being engendered? All of this an added incubus on business, increasing the cost of production, raising the cost of living without raising wages to permit the people to buy. These code authority employees are a new army of seven year locusts who at the expense of the public are eating up a good part of the people's substance. Put them back to useful work.

The American people should never again allow the destruction or limitation of crops or animals; never again allow the United States to adopt an economy of scarcity. A democracy should allow no poverty, no hunger, no involuntary unemployment, for every one in a democracy has an unalienable right to work for a living.

Economic liberty or proper distribution of wealth and the proper forms of taxation has nothing to do with the question of liberty. It has only to do with economics. But only a free people with liberty of speech under a democratic form of government, can change economic conditions by ballots instead of bullets, in order to bring about the happiness of the people, one of the purposes of government as stated in the Declaration of Independence.

Some men in a hurry to save the world before nightfall would dispense with all liberty. We stand against regimentation of the people under any guise or pretext. Voluntary cooperation is not despotism; compulsory cooperation carried too far may be the road to tyranny and tyranny is tyranny. We do not fear economic change we do fear the growth of monopolies and loss of liberty. We stand against the despotism of government or men. All changes of government or society should be fully discussed. We are not afraid of paper bullets containing ideas; we are not afraid of verbal shot containing controversial ammunition. It is so easy to sell one's heritage of freedom for a mess of pottage; the necessities, the exigencies seen so great, the sale seems so temporary the struggle to hold it seems so hopeless, so useless.

You are familiar with the Rubyiat of Omar Kha/am and know how he describes the sellers of wine and asks:

"Well, I wonder often what the vinters buy One half so precious as the stuff they sell."

To paraphrase Omar Khayam, I say to those in panic who are advocating that we sell liberty for a regimented state:

I wonder what they will receive that will Be worth half the liberty they sell.

In Chicago at the World's Fair Exposition you may see the Prairie Schooner, also called the Covered Wagon, with its hard wheels and springs and brakes. As you look at it you may think of the men and women, who, because land was free and therefore opportunity was open, rode hundreds of miles in that wagon across country. You may wonder whether the men and women of today would have the courage to travel across a continent in a vehicle like that. Have we been softened by rubber tires, and fine springs on upholstered vehicles? Are we less industrious? Have we with all of electric and steam power less capacity to produce?

We refuse to say with Browning:

"Never glad, confident morning again."

We reply in the words of Bronte:

"No coward's soul is mine, No trembler in the world's troubled sphere."

America is appalled at the spread of crime. Crime increases with the increased hazard of living. When young men and young women stand helpless and hopeless without jobs what can government and society expect? When middle age or old age finds itself desperate and in need, characters break under the strain and crime increases. When, added to that situation, there is the invasion of constitutional liberties by the law-enforcing agencies, the third degree, the invasions of homes, the dragnet arrests of alleged agitators or aliens or so-called "reds," all in violation of the law, we realize that the problem of much of all crime cannot be solved by law-enforcing agencies but by abolition of unemployment, starvation wages, the stretch-out system, long hours, but, more important than all, by opening opportunities creating a condition of more jobs than men.

We can care for the unemployed, we can feed the hungry and provide shelter for the homeless without regimenting the nation in business, without goose-steeping every little industry, without leaving loose a bureaucratic flock of nosey incompetents running around clothed in brief authority, and with all the thunder of the majesty of the United States government behind them, giving petty orders with the little man and the little business cracked down upon while prices keep soaring for the necessities of life and business and individuals carry additional taxes and unemployment continues to grow with the number of those needing relief mounting. Food and grain and cotton and cattle have been destroyed in the past and people by tens of thousands have been paid for doing nothing. The government must take care of the needy. That is part of the duty of government. I defy any lawyer, however, to show any authority ed in the National Government to pay farmers for not producing, not working.

It is no disgrace nor dishonor to fail in the conflict for justice and liberty. It is only a disgrace and dishonor not to enter the arena and give battle. Democracy and parliamentary government with all its faults is the sole hope of a world seeking a possible solution of economic problems. If depotism conquers it will mould the world in unchangeable form; it will build on the masses for the benefit of only a few. Luther Burbank once said:

"I shall be content if, because of me, there shall be better fruits and fairer flowers."

We should be content if because of our battle for a free earth there shall be better human beings, peace, and the abolition of poverty, liberty and democracy in all the world.

So, take heart; consult your despair, your desperation in a tottering world; take heart for the earth in all its fruitfulness has not been destroyed. Tickle the earth and it will still laugh a harvest. Take heed for the learning and science of mankind, with all of steam and electric power, is still our heritage ready for use. Take heed of what should you fear? Our ancestors came from all parts of the world with courage, facing unknown conditions and dangers, helped clear a continent and established the glory of these United States. Can we do less?